Guillaume Henri Dufour

Guillaume Henri Dufour (15 September 1787-14 July 1875) was a general of the First French Empire and Switzerland during the Napoleonic Wars and the Sonderbund War. Dufour was famous for presiding over the First Geneva Convention, the establishment of the Red Cross, and the founding of the Swiss Federal Office of Topography.

Biography
Guillaume Henri Dufour was born in Konstanz, Wurttemberg, Holy Roman Empire on 15 September 1787 to a family that had been temporarily exiled from Geneva in Switzerland. Dufour studied at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris in 1807, and he joined the Grande Armee of the First French Empire during the Napoleonic Wars, fighting on Corfu in 1810. In 1817, he left the service of the Bourbon Restoration monarchy and returned to Switzerland, becoming a military engineer and topographer. Dufour remained a general, leading the 12,000-strong Landwehr I in Zurich, and Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was one of the officers serving under him. In 1847, he crushed the Catholic alliance in the south and center of Switzerland in the Sonderbund War, and he put down revolutionary unrest across the country. In 1864, he was a member of the committee that oversaw the First Geneva Convention and the creation of the Red Cross. Dufour died in 1875 at the age of 87, and Switzerland's highest mountain, the Dufourspritze, and the Rue du General Dufour in Geneva are named after him.